Features » April 24, 2006

Keeping America Empty

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At the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula lies the quaint town of Petoskey, population 6,080. In late March, a thick white shelf of ice still covers Lake Michigan, and a few miles north, over the Mackinac Bridge, the Upper Peninsula appears as a grey tangle of virgin wilderness. This isn’t the end of the world, residents say, but you can see it from here.

The town seems to have escaped much of the last four decades. Mom-and-pop stores and unassuming churches line its downtown, and there’s hardly a chain restaurant in sight. People wear flag pins on their lapels, even when they’re not running for office.

On the day I drive to Petoskey, the radio is buzzing with voices from the Great Immigration Debate: ranting talk show hosts, sermonizing senators and the chanting protests of thousands in Grand Rapids, a few hours south of Petoskey. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they are marching against House-passed legislation that would turn approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants into felons.

All the cacophony lacks is a mention of the one man who set much of this in motion 25 years ago, the man I had come to see: 72-year-old retired opthamologist John Tanton.

Tanton may not make headlines, but even a casual dusting of today’s anti-immigration movement reveals his fingerprints everywhere. Turn on Lou Dobbs and you’ll see experts from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the nation’s oldest and most influential immigration restriction group, which Tanton founded in 1979. Scan the newspapers and you’ll find Republican lawmakers reporting a tidal wave of calls from members of NumbersUSA, which Tanton cofounded. Watch the committee hearings on C-SPAN and you’ll hear anti-immigration talking points lifted straight from the Center for Immigration Studies, another Tanton creation. And on and on.

Thirty years ago, “if you wanted to call some group and say, ‘Tell me about immigration,’ there was no phone number,” recalls founding FAIR board member Otis Graham. Devin Burghart, who monitors the anti-immigration movement for the progressive Center for New Community, says that Tanton has done for immigration politics “what Pat Robertson did for the Christian Right. As a tactician, he’s done a brilliant job.”

Given that the movement he helped create now finds its base among conservative Republicans, you might expect John Tanton to be an unapologetic reactionary. You’d be wrong. He’s a self-described progressive, ex-Sierra Club member, Planned Parenthood supporter and harsh critic of neoclassical economists. So I wanted to know: How did a whip-smart, mild-mannered farm boy committed to conserving the natural world end up seeding and nurturing a movement that now dispatches gun-toting vigilantes to patrol the border?

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In person, Tanton hardly seems like a firebrand. He speaks softly, and carries himself with the reserved politeness of the small town doctor he was for 35 years. When I get to Petoskey at noon on a Monday, I find him in a Presbyterian church, where for the last 20 years his Great Books club has convened. Tanton briefly interrupts the discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes to introduce me, casually mentioning the magazine I write for, where I went to school and even what my major was. For a 72-year-old man, he sure knows his way around Google.

Tanton and his wife Mary Lou moved to Petoskey in 1964 after he finished medical school. The town’s small clinic had an opening, and, particularly important, some of the most pristine wilderness in America was just minutes away. The couple quickly threw themselves into a variety of conservation causes.

A fundamental problem the nascent environmental movement identified was, in Tanton’s words, that “the economic system is based on continual growth forever,” which “in a finite world” isn’t possible. The Tantons and others in the movement became convinced that something would have to give, and that it shouldn’t be the planet. To avoid catastrophe, society would have to reconstitute itself to favor conservation over growth. It is a small-c conservative philosophy: What the cheerleaders of modernity called “progress,” they called a plague.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich made these ideas mainstream with his book, The Population Bomb. With terrifying certainty, Ehrlich argued that the exponential growth in population and the incremental growth in food could only mean one thing: mass famine. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the book begins. “In the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

It was an instant sensation, turning “overpopulation” into a hot topic and landing Ehrlich repeatedly on “The Tonight Show.” Tanton had been ahead of the curve. As early as the ’50s, he avidly read reports from the Population Reference Bureau, and by the time Ehrlich’s book was published, he and Mary Lou had already started work on the first Northern Michigan chapter of Planned Parenthood. “I believed in the multiplication tables,” says Tanton. “Since I was a physician and could do something about birth control, it struck me that this was where I could make my contribution to the conservation movement.”

Time hasn’t been kind to Ehrlich’s predictions: Due to a technological revolution in agriculture, there was no mass famine. World population growth has slowed considerably; the United Nations now predicts it could plateau by 2050. Many, if not most, professional demographers today are more worried about depopulation in the developed world.

But in many quarters, this “fixed pie” view persists, and the logic isn’t necessarily flawed. Resources, particularly oil, are finite and the notion that technology will always be able to bail us out is dubious. Perhaps Ehrlich’s predictions weren’t wrong, just premature.

Tanton, whose worldview was forged in this intellectual milieu, is haunted by the spectre of an apocalypse just over the horizon, and the thought that he is one of a select few who see it coming. Sitting at his desk during one of our interviews, he reaches into a drawer, withdraws an electric metronome and flicks it on. As the device pulses at 135 beats per minute, he explains that each beat is a new birth (at the 1969 rate), and each new birth requires resources: food, clothing, education. It’s a trick he used when he gave talks on population in the ’70s, and it’s effective. His voice barely rises over the percussive onslaught, and after just 30 seconds you want to yell: “Make it stop!”

You get the sense that Tanton hears that beat inside his head all the time.

In 1969, Tanton started and chaired the population committee of his local Sierra Club chapter, and when Ehrlich and like-minded environmentalists founded the advocacy group Zero Population Growth (ZPG), he became one of its most active members, rising to its presidency in 1975. By then, the birthrate for Americans had declined below the replacement rate, but the American population was projected to keep growing. Tanton settled on the culprit: immigration.

The number of immigrants was still small by today’s standards but had started to creep upwards, thanks in part to a 1965 immigration bill that instituted family reunification policies and did away with 40 years of quotas that heavily favored northern Europeans. Since immigrants had higher birthrates, reducing their numbers would allow the United States to achieve the zero population growth that had seemed a pipe dream only a few years earlier.

Tanton pushed for the Sierra Club to take a strong stand to reduce immigration, but the organization balked. He didn’t have much more success with his fellow travelers at ZPG. Tanton chalks it up to fear of tackling a taboo subject, but it seems just as likely that they couldn’t see why it mattered on which side of the Rio Grande someone was born. Today, ZPG, since renamed Population Connection, takes what its current president, John Seager, calls a “global approach,” supporting female literacy, access to birth control and family-planning services in the developing world. If Tanton’s concern is the health of the planet, why doesn’t he subscribe to this view? He explains that reducing immigration will force countries like Mexico to confront their own population growth rates. “Each country,” he says, “ought to try to match its population to its resource base.”

Ultimately, Tanton realized it would be impossible to graft a new agenda onto an existing organization and resolved to found his own group. With Otis Graham and a couple of sympathetic board members poached from ZPG and several hundred thousand dollars in startup money from a wealthy Ehrlich devotee, Tanton founded FAIR on Jan. 2, 1979, with a mission to end illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration.

It was at this point that Tanton initiated the hyper-productive schedule he’d maintain for the next 29 years, spending Tuesday through Friday seeing patients at the clinic and working evenings, weekends and Mondays on immigration. While his physician’s life gave him the “ability to restore sight,” it was repetitive, he says. His activism was “abstract, focused on the long term and people called you bad names, but it was extremely stimulating.”

Tanton talks with such evident passion about the minutiae of organizing–the importance of correctly naming organizations, rules for recruiting effective board members–that it’s tempting to see his work on immigration as something like Oppenheimer’s work on the bomb, driven as much by the sheer intellectual challenge as by its ultimate goal. In an early memo to FAIR staffers, he explained his enjoyment of fundraising: “t’s the ultimate chess game, in three dimensions, with the players all able to move themselves.”

The Tantons spent a year in D.C. working for FAIR between 1981 and 1982 (“crowded” is John’s assessment of the city) and their enthusiasm was contagious. One FAIR staffer wrote that the organization had “all the excitement and energy of a gold rush town.” When he returned to Petoskey, Tanton continued to grow the movement, helping to found the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, Immigration Reform Law Institute and a journal, the Social Contract Press, which he has published out of his office for 16 years. He had some successes: FAIR membership grew to 50,000 by 1990 (today it claims 198,000 “members and supporters”), and it successfully lobbied for increased border security and harsher penalties in the two rounds of immigration legislation passed in 1986 and 1996.

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I am so glad to learn about Dr. Tanton and all his work. I agree with him exactly and completely. I have only recently become aware of the overpopulation problem brought on by illegal immigration, and am glad to find a way to help put a stop to this illegal alien mess in this country. I live in Los Angeles -- the center of illegal activity, and I am sick of it! I am also aware of the sovereignty problem -- without borders, we have no right to rule 'our country'. The country needs definite borders, and I'm willing to work to get them closed and firmed up!

Posted by Alexandra Ormsby on 2014-12-09 23:23:39

Fair enough article about a complicated issue. Good work.

Posted by Guest on 2013-09-01 19:41:49

Who do you think is maintaining the infrastructure in this country? In a post-industrial economy where industry migrates to foreign shores in search of zero (or negative) tax rates, cheap labor and the virtual absence of environmental restrictions, the people who once were employed by local industry, both foreign and domestic, are inclined to migrate elsewhere to obtain employment. Many of them end up here, employed by governments which are compelled by the erosion of their tax base to privatize the services they once performed themselves. In other words, they subcontract those services to companies who hire the immigrants, at slaveshop rates, to perform them.
Welcome to the wonderful world of a globalized, free market economy where, apparenly, it's still possible to blame the immigrants for the erosion of our infrastructure and simultaneously employ them to repair it.Posted by Major Major on 2006-05-06 08:06:35

RE: the title "Keeping America Empty," the USA is far from empty.
This October the US population will hit 300 million, projected by the Census Bureau to reach 420 million by just 2050. Do the arithmetic. That's 120 million more people in just 44 years! Try this test: ask a fairly well educated person what the US population is and they will probably underestimate by 20-30 million.
That's more than a doubling of the population in my short lifetime. And you can see the consequences everywhere, in our inability to maintain infrastructure, from roads to levees to schools. And there is the pressure on all natural resources, from wild lands to rivers to fisheries. Water is going to be one of the most limiting resources, particularly in the far west and the high plains, likely made worse by climatic shifts due to global warming.
Whatever one's take on additional immigration and growth may be, it is ought to recognize this fact that we are already bulging with people.Posted by questionauthority on 2006-05-04 20:03:10

Major Major, you are my hero and the only one speaking with truthfulness and courage. Every time a subject arises, all I find is people who write to tangle things up, show their literacy and do the work the old sophists did in Old Greece but they are never prepared to get to the root of the problem or its causes and rather waste precious space calling each other names or refering to who said what which really doesn't matter.
If your promoted NAFTA had been fair to other countries you wouldn't have so many desperate people risking their lives to enter your "paradise". Don't fool yourselves, many of us in the American continent (yes, we are Americans too) have your game perfectly identified and are doing our best to act accordingly.Posted by Maria on 2006-05-03 21:19:39

JonathanNil
That quote comes from a memo written by John Tanton in 1986 to the attendees of a White Supremacist conference called WITAN IV. WITAN was/is a White Supremacist group founded by Tanton, which is how he got the attendee list.
You can read the memo here: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=125Posted by november on 2006-05-01 06:12:17

According to Leonard Zeskind, "The New Nativism" in The American Prospect 11.10.05 at
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10485
****
It was Tanton who founded the anti-immigration movementPosted by JonathanNil on 2006-04-30 17:43:55

Having stolen the land from the original inhabitants, the thieves were compelled to import slaves to work it, because the indigenous inhabitants could not be compelled to submit to slavery, whereas the people seized from another continent had no other choice. Now their descendants complain about the evils of illegal immigration, as if the emigration of their own antecedants was a virtuous event.
Hilarity doesn't even begin to describe the convoluted logic employed to justify the moral rectitude of those who profit from the benefits of conquest.Posted by Major Major on 2006-04-29 09:17:19

I find that Dr Tanton's walk across the cultural divide is very interesting, if for no more than it's rarity. The right wing is full of confused and frightened white guys, so caught up in their racism and bigotry, that they can't see how they are "pissing in their own soup".
In a similar way many on the left are against the racism on simple moral grounds, if not that they themselves are at the pointy end of that racism, but cannot get a handle on the devastation a bottomless labor force has on everybodies quality of life (except those who hire that pool and their quality of life is due to their exploitation of that bottomless labor force, and even they are forced to do so because they compete with others who do).
As Dr. Dean has pointed out, those guys should be natural Democrats, and he has taken steps to reach out to them, though in ways less exploitative than Dr Tanton.
Fixing immigration through walls won't work, any more than walls will keep out drugs, and they can't even keep the drugs out of prisons. You have to fix the underlying problem.
If the Immigrant benefited from outing his exploiter, and the exploiter had something to fear, illegal immigration would dry up in short order.
As it is, many of the jobs are migrating to China where people are working for wages Mexicans could not afford to take. And that is another greater problem.Posted by FreeDem on 2006-04-28 17:40:31

By the way, whattheheck. I already said discussions of illegal immigration WITHOUT the white supremacists is fine. So you've gone from hyperbole to beating a dead horse.
To do a whitewash article on someone with ties to white supremacists ON the subject of illegal immigration WITHOUT pointing out their ties to white supremacists is a horrendous breach of journalistic ethics. And that has been my point all along.Posted by november on 2006-04-28 06:05:43

OK...
The tar and feather/lynching was a bit of hyperbole, but they need to get the message that hiring illegals will not be tolerated. As for whitewashing the Tanton story, my point is quite simple Posted by whattheheck on 2006-04-28 05:32:12

Yikes!
When people like knocko and whatthehell appear to join the ranks of the liberals and the progressives, you know it's time to head for the hills and barricade the village gates.
Lynch an employer? Now there's a novel (presumptive) solution, one worthy of anyone seeking to ingratiate himself with the people he ordinarilly dislikes.
But, seriously, folks. Even fascists are people, even though they themselves would prefer to regard themselves as white people. The State of Michigan, home to a wide variety of fascist organizations, has a long and (dis)honorable history of fascist infatuation. Henry Ford himself was a fascist, when it was fashionable to be fascist. Faced with a growing labor crisis (sharing profits with the people who made them possible is always considered a crisis by the folks who supervise the labor of the people who do the work), the auto industry decided to import Southern black labor to compete with Northern white unionized labor, a typically fascist tactic, and thereby initiated a half-century of racist retribution.
You gotta love these guys. They sure know how to run a railroad.Posted by Major Major on 2006-04-27 17:36:52

An article that whitewashs (no pun intended) the history of John Tantons strong ties to white supremacists gets accolades from folks who then recommend lynchings.
What a suprise. Not.Posted by november on 2006-04-27 12:17:17

Knocko,
Right on. I might add the doubling of visas for high tech and other white collar jobs have made it questionable whether the cost of college is worth while.
Mr. Tanton is, in my view, just another diversion from the real immigration issues. Race is not the problem. Mexicans are not the problem. This is a Washington D.C. created mess. Now we are supposed to expect them to clean it up? Give me a break. Send them back on vacation where they can do no more damage.
Maybe itPosted by whattheheck on 2006-04-27 12:03:41

Mr. tanton is a true conservative, which ironically these days is a true progressive. Illegal immigration not only artificially raises US population and damages the environment, but allows employers to ignore existing black and white workers, particularly young people who lack experience in jobs. The No Child Left Behind Act will result in millions of high school dropouts. Testing will discourage young people who are not "college" bound or proficient readers. Talented young people who could find lucrative blue collar careers are underpriced by illegal immigrants. Unions are undermined by the illegals as well.
America, like Mexico and every other nation, has the right and duty to its citizens to define citizenship and control its borders and work rules. So-called free trade, pushed thru mostly by Bill and Hilary Clinton, has devastated the working class of the USA. We need to send businessmen who hire illegals(meatpacking, Walmart) to tough prisons, cut off education and medicaid funds to illegals.Posted by knocko on 2006-04-26 16:28:19

wolf- Sorry you don't understand plain english. perhaps a nice language class would help. After that a quick followup with logic. Your 'loaded question' was indeed a 'strawman'. Feel free to google both terms.Posted by november on 2006-04-26 10:46:08

november - sorry you got so confused. I set up no strawman, simply asked you - politely - why you made an assertion. What a waste of my - and apparently your - time.Posted by wolf on 2006-04-26 10:39:27

wolf:
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november - "In These Times" has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.
Can one be against illegal immigration without being a "white supremacist"? In fact, is there any connection between the two?
Why did you make the assertion above?
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Gee wolf, could it have been because of the sentence that was written BEFORE the one you quote? Let's find out.
"Several sites show links between Tanton and his partners to white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a number of articles on John Tanton. www.splcenter.org"
Yes, it sure looks like it is in that sentence. I guess I _did_ include that for a good reason dontchaknow.
Your strawman is the usual nonsense. No where do I say being against illegal immigration means one is a white supremacist. However, this is the second article in 'In These Times' in as many months that uses people linked to white supremacist organizations in the USA to knock illegal immigration.
Having a conversation about illegal immigration is a-ok by me. To invite white supremacists and neo-nazis and people that have been shown to associate with them to the head of the table for such a conversation is not valid.
For you to pretend it is out-of-bounds for me to point out the table for a conversation about illegal immigration in 'In These Times' is being packed with questionable sources is absurd.
P.S. Go to GOOGLE & enter
"john tanton" site:splcenter.org
& press Google Search and see for yourself.Posted by november on 2006-04-26 09:14:29

november - Posted by wolf on 2006-04-26 08:27:32

Lou Dobbs is a tool. After all, he graduated from Harvard, with a degree in economics, no less, which proves the point. What can you say about a guy who cites a study on immigration from the National Academy of Sciences to conclude that even though immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars to the American economy, the costs of immigrant labor debit the economy by ten to twenty billion dollars, when in fact the study explicitly concludes that immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars in net benefits to the economy. Or when he states that one third of the American prison population are "illegal aliens" when in fact the accurate citation is that one third of the prison population are not citizens of the US.
I don't mean to imply that my absence of regard for Dobbs' inability to produce a fair and balanced summary of the facts is an endorsement of Thomas "Flathead" Friedman, whose misrepresentations of the truth are equal to those of Dobbs.
It's hilarious to read to the racist rants of people whose great-great-grandparents emigrated from the eastern colonies to extirpate the natives in the western "territories", whose great-great-grandchildren presumably invade and occupy the cultural terrain of our patriotic homeland.Posted by Major Major on 2006-04-25 15:47:05

Several sites show links between Tanton and his partners to white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a number of articles on John Tanton. www.splcenter.org
"In These Times" has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.Posted by november on 2006-04-25 12:10:01